Contemplation Quotes - Page 4

• Making work for me is being in the world, but it's also being specific about being in the world. I'm interested in this increasingly rare space of contemplation and taking the time and energy to be thoughtful.

  Zoe Leonard

  Thoughtful, Space, Energy

  Interview with Molly Prentiss, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 13, 2016.

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• A Seed for Contemplation:
  Creative people who cherish the gift of life often slip into the secret chambers of the creative mind. Their solutions are well-rounded, more sensible than those of people who rely solely upon reason as their mainstay. Gratitude unseals fountains of creativity, because a grateful person is relaxed. This allows him to take stock of his circumstances with an objective mind. A creative person often gets three-dimensional answers to his problems. -.

  Harold Klemp

  Gratitude, Grateful, Creativity

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• Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze by the sweet power of music.

  William Shakespeare

  Sweet, Inspiration, Eye

  William Shakespeare (2001). “The Merchant of Venice: The Applause Shakespeare Library”, p.152, Hal Leonard Corporation

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• Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.

  Ross Perot

  Writing, Men, Two

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• Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

  Hans Arp

  Technology, Men, Essence

  "Arp on Arp: poems, essays, memories". p. 231, 1972.

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• It was the contemplation of God that created men who were equal, for it was in God that they were equal.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Equality, Men, Equal

  Antoine de Saint Exupery (1942). “Flight to Arras”

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• I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

  William Wordsworth

  Powerful, Poetry, Feelings

  William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth (1815). “Poems”, p.388

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• The contemplation of beauty in nature, in art, in literature, in human character, diffuses through our being a soothing and subtle joy, by which the heart's anxious and aching cares are softly smiled away.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Beauty, Art, Character

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1871). “Success and Its Conditions”, p.207

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• You are purer than the pure. Never manifold, you are individual Consciousness.
  Unborn, unchanging, all-pervasive You are a mountain of joy.

  Swami Muktananda

  Joy, Mountain, Consciousness

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• Those who are more adapted to the active life can prepare themselves for contemplation in the practice of the active life, while those who are more adapted to the contemplative life can take upon themselves the works of the active life so as to become yet.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Contemplative Life, Practice, Adapted

  St Thomas Aquinas (2013). “Summa Theologica, Volume 4 (Part III, First Section)”, p.1940, Cosimo, Inc.

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• A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.

  W. H. Auden

  Love, Inspirational, Dream

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• When human beings have been fascinated by the contemplation of their own hearts, the more intricate biological pattern of the female has become a model for the artist, the mystic, and the saint. When mankind turns instead to what can be done, altered, built, invented, in the outer world, all natural properties of men, animals, or metals become handicaps to be altered rather than clues to be followed.

  Margaret Mead

  Heart, Men, Artist

  Margaret Mead (1975). “Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world”, William Morrow & Co

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• Humor is the contemplation of the finite from the point of view of the infinite.

  Christian Morgenstern

  Life, Humor, Views

  "The Hidden Souls of Words" by Mary Cox Garner, (p. 142), 2004.

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• Leisure is a form of silence, not noiselessness. It is the silence of contemplation such as occurs when we let our minds rest on a rosebud, a child at play, a Divine mystery, or a waterfall.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Children, Play, Silence

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• Works of art must persist as objects of contemplation.

  Herbert Read

  Art, Persist, Objects

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• The mind is exercised by the variety and multiplicity of the subject matter, while the character is moulded by the contemplation of virtue and vice.

  Quintilian

  Character, Mind, Vices

  Quintilian (1953). “The Instituto Oratoria of Quintilian”

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• As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Animal, Links, Able

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, David Stuart Davies (1998). “The Best of Sherlock Holmes”, p.53, Wordsworth Editions

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• He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

  Isaac Asimov

  Reading, Book, Men

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• Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death...to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up-never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation; it's like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You'll get wonderful things out of that.

  Alan Watts

  Sleep, Acceptance, Skeletons

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• Nature in darkness groans and men are bound to sullen contemplation in the night: restless they turn on beds of sorrow; in their inmost brain feeling the crushing wheels, they rise, they write the bitter words of stern philosophy and knead the bread of knowledge with tears and groans.

  William Blake

  Crush, Philosophy, Writing

  William Blake (1966). “Complete Writings: With Variant Readings”, p.379, Oxford University Press, USA

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• I contemplate the body, dead and diseased as well as alive and healthy.

  Richard Selzer

  Healthy, Alive, Body

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• The world should contemplate a nuclear weapons-armed Iran with the greatest of concern.

  Daniel Fried

  Iran, Nuclear, World

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• I have created a life style that supports contemplation, service to words.

  Bell Hooks

  Support, Style, Life Style

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• The man incapable of contemplation cannot be an artist, but only a skillful workman.

  Ananda Coomaraswamy

  Artist, Men, He Man

  Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, Rama P. Coomaraswamy (2004). “The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswamy”, p.133, World Wisdom, Inc

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• The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

  Clive James

  Art, Expression, Long

  Clive James (1983). “Glued to the box: television criticism from the Observer, 1979-82”, Jonathan Cape

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